A medical secretary conducts an optical biometric recording with an auto kerato-refracto tonometer. (Photo : Getty Images)
While Apple wants to use consumers' fingerprints for payment and Google and Amazon have face recognition technology, Alibaba is planning to use the eyes for biometric security in payment in the future.
On Wednesday, Sept. 14, Alibaba's payments and financial arm, Ant Financial announced that it purchased EyeVerify, a Missouri-based company, for about $70 to S100 million, sources said.
According to the report by qz.com, the acquisition indicates the company's expansion efforts abroad, while advancing the use of biometric security.
A software that identifies the red veins in a person's sclera, or the eyeball's white part, has been produced by EyeVerify. The eye's vein patterns can be captured using a smartphone camera, which can be recorded and use to unlock the phone or log into an account, in the same way that fingerprint is used in some smartphones. EyeVerify said that this verification form is secure.
In July last year, the software was introduced by Ant Financial in its Alipay mobile payments app to a small group of beta testers, who were given options to log in to the app using an eye test, as well as using ordinary passwords and fingerprint.
Investing in biometrics for security is seen to benefit Chinese companies, since online fraud is rampant and even Chinese Internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, find it difficult to prevent password theft and scams. In 2015, about 24,866 cases of online fraud were reported to Jiewang, a service company that collects the report in coordination with the city of Beijing and Qihoo 360.
Alibaba had earlier shown interest in using biometrics for security when it made a demo of the "pay with a selfie" on Alipay, which used facial recognition from Face++, a Chinese startup that later partnered with Uber.
With the acquisition of EyeVerify, Ant Financial will have a chance to expand overseas as both Alibaba and Ant Financial are not popular ouyside of China. Meanwhile, the U.S. company has also partnered with smartphone companies such as Samsung and Nokia as well as with banks like U.S.-based Wells Fargo.
